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The Drowned

On the border of Europe lies a mass grave: the Mediterranean. This series presents objects found on the bodies of drowned refugees in an effort to humanize the numbing statistics.

Photographs and text by Anna Autio

The Drowned

On the border of Europe lies a mass grave: the Mediterranean. This series presents objects found on the bodies of drowned refugees in an effort to humanize the numbing statistics.

To many, the drowned refugees appear merely as constantly rising numbers on the pages of daily newspapers. Behind every number, however, lies a world suffering, and every one of these numbers is someone else’s mother or father, child, brother or sister.

These photographs and objects were found in the Mediterranean Sea on the bodies of refugees who drowned on April 18th, 2015, in the worst shipwreck in Italy’s history. Almost 800 people lost their lives. Italy is the first country in Europe to initiate a national program to identify missing migrants. The objects, which I photographed at the Labanof Institute in Milan, are used by Italian authorities as clues in their attempt to identify the drowned.

On the border of Europe lies a mass grave, the Mediterranean, which continues to claim more casualties.

If you’d like to see more work on this and similar topics, we’d recommend these previous features: Papers, a series on the objects discarded along Europe’s refugee trail; The Stateless, Placeless Desert, Gohar Dashti’s project on the relationship between body and home in contemporary Iranian society; and Mediterranean Migration, Mathieu Willcocks’s remarkable series shot onboard a migrant rescue ship.